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Monday, October 19, 2015

Perception of Information Literacy among Faculty #ecil2015

Still liveblogging from the European Conference on Information Literacy 2015 in Tallinn. The next paper I heard was Perception of Information Literacy among Faculty at the University of Graz, Tallinn University and University of Zagreb was presented by Valentina Kirinić, coauthored with Christian Schlögl and Sirje Virkus.
The study explored how IL is perceived by academic staff in 3 different disciplines at the three universities. The perception was explored by looking at attitudes and behaviour and practice.
26 academics were interviewed, mainly using closed questions. They were asked to express their familiarity with IL, say whether they thought they were info literate and express the needs, benefits etc. of IL training. Awareness was greatest at Tallinn, but there the discipline was information science. At Graz (business studies) awareness was lowest and at Zagreb there was more familiarity than at Graz, but it tended yo be associated with information technology. In terms of different elements of IL, there was no broad agreement between academics at Graz and Zabgreb, with information sources and quality assessment prioritised at Zagreb, and articulation of information needs at Graz, whilst at Tallinn they were all seen as important, depending on context. Most respondents saw advanced training in IL as important, with only one person at Graz and 3 at Zagreb disagreeing. However there were various views of what kind of training ws needed. Academics at Graz and Zagreb mostly thought IL should be a separate course, whilst at Tallinn they thought it should be integrated.Photo by Sheila Webber: Tallinn, 2011

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Information Literacy is ...

"the adoption of appropriate information behaviour to identify, through whatever channel or medium, information well fitted to information needs, leading to wise and ethical use of information in society." (Webber and Johnston)